The SCDF and CNB done in by a local Matahari?

Slowly the story begins to unfold, and the public awaits the sordid details about the dramatic falls from grace of the SCDF and CNB Chiefs. Much has been made of the fact that no money may have changed hands and that they had been done in by booze, makan and a local Matahari.

But I think we might be missing the point here.

Fact is two very big guns from the Ministry of Home Affairs had been so easily snared by the wiles of one woman. A pretty mysterious one at that. So much for our national security. I mean, these were no less than two major units with the Home Ministry! The Mas Selamat debacle pales by comparison.

Methinks our Minister of Home Affairs need to give us a bit more reassurance than to tell us the guilty will be punished.

High salaries discourages corruption? A reality check.

Singaporeans woke up this morning to the alarming news that the Chiefs of both the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) and the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) have been relieved of their position pending investigations by the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB).

This must have shaken the civil services to the core.

Without presuming guilt of these two guys, but if the suspicions are true that they have engaged in corrupt practices, it must surely raise serious concerns about the validity of the logic that corruption is prevented by paying high salaries. These guys have certainly not been paid peanuts.

To my reckoning, if we use money as the main lure into public service, surely that must attract only those for whom money and more money becomes the driving force for their ambitions. Corruption is fueled by greed, and there is never enough to assuage that thirst.

The most effective way to stem corruption is to have an independent, transparent and effective CPIB, and a vigilant public who is prepared to whistleblow. Our CPIB has done an excellent job so far, thankfully. But if we want our politicians to be free from corruption, then the CPIB must have the freedom to investigate all officials including the cabinet and even the Prime Minister. That the CPIB reports to the Prime Minister's Office does not give it a freehand in performing this critical function. Perhaps this line of reporting should be reviewed? Since we have an elected Presidency, should not the CPIB report to the President, rather than to the Prime Minister?

LTA and regulatory capture? HSA are you listening?

A week ago in the Sunday Times Senior Correspondent  Christopher Tan write a nice article about the recent SMRT wayang and the LTA, raising the issue of a regulatory capture occurring between the transport regulator LTA and the transport industry.

The concept of regulatory capture is very much assocated with Economics Nobel Laureate George Stigler. It refers to the type of government failure when a public sector regulator has a cosy cosy relationship with the regulated service provider, to the extent that the regulator becomes a promoter of the regulated rather than a protector of the public needs.

Is the LTA a victim.... or are we, the public, victims of the regulatory capture between LTA and the transport industry.

This is actually not an isolated problem affecting the LTA, but can be seen to exist in many of Singapore's regulators.

The HSA (Health Sciences Authority) for example may be in such a predicament. Formed in the past from all the disparate MOH subunits in the Ministry of Health that the MOH wanted to decant from the Ministry, the functions of the various parts of the HSA range all the way from service provision, regulatory and promotional. Regulatory capture?...certainly many opportunities for this to develop in the HSA. Successive Board Chairmen and CEs have not made any attempt to deconflict all these functions, choosing instead to keep the easy and cosy relationships which made their work easier. However, unless this regulatory captures are dismantled, one has to question to what extent public needs are sacrificed to meed the needs of the industry.

By the way, George Stigler was also well known in medical circles for his attempt to optimize the daily recommended diet. Like all economic solutions, the result was totally unpalatable.

Experts disagree with NEA

I read with interest the recent disagreement between an expert panel of drainage experts and the National Environment Agency (NEA) with respect to the annual rainfall trends. No discernable trend, sez the NEA. But the expert panel disagreed. You can almost see Prof Lui Pao Chuen shaking his head in disbelief. According to the panel, the annual rainfall has actually been increasing at about 15mm per year between 1968 and 2008.

And it's my turn to shake my head in disbelief. How can something so fundamental be in dispute? I mean, I can understand differences in scientific perspectives and theories, but the interpretation of hard numbers?? There is either a trend or not. How can there be such a fundamental disagreement about whether the rainfall is going up or not?

Intuitively, and not having access to the detailed data, I am more inclined to believe the expert panel. Global warming has been melting the ice caps. There is just so much more water circulating in the environment. Sea levels are rising and projected to rise even more. Surely more rain is cycling through the atmosphere. The increasing spate of ponding, oops, sorry, flooding says a lot about how much more rain has been falling.

It kinda makes me question what's happening at the NEA. How are they, and have they been examining the data they have been collecting? Can we trust their projections for the future? And can we trust any assurances that they are adequately preparing for the future?

This is just one of the indications that we really need our agencies to provide more publicly available information. Hitherto, the public has been trained to accept sanitized proclamations from our public agencies that all is well with the world, and Singapore, and that we should trust only their interpretation of fragmented and cryptic data shown to the public.

This is not acceptable any more.

This episode speaks volumes about why we need data to be made available to the public so that they can be scrutinized independently. More eyes are always better. French philosopher Henri Bergson said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” How true.

In this case, the NEA mind appears to have been conditioned to comprehend a rather fixed set of reality based on historical weather models; models which are not applicable in today's world anymore.

If it appears I am picking on the NEA, I am not. This problem exists in all our government agencies. They need to break free from historical models, and look at their data/stats with fresh sets of eyes. Today is a very different  world. Importantly, my plea to all the public agencies is that Singapore's interest is best served by placing much more institutional and government data in the public domain so that independent conclusions can be drawn about what is happening, so that more independent options for the future can be contemplated.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year all! 

Have a blessed Christmas all :The doctor never reported that the angels sang....!

One of my favourite books in the Bible is Gospel of Luke. Luke, as well as the Acts of the Apostles are supposed to have been written by the Greco-Syrian physician, Luke. Although not an eyewitness to the many of the events he reported on, he drew heavily on eye witness accounts about the life on Jesus as well as the events which took place around the early church. His accounts all carry the trademark attention to personal details and emotions.

His account of the night of Jesus birth has provided many of the inspirations for the celebration of Christmas. Unfortunately they have been pretty much distorted by romantic notions and more recent commercial interests.

"Hark!" The herald angels sang. Or did they? The romanticized accounts all have mass choir of angels celebrating proclaiming "Peace on earth, goodwill to men!". Fireworks in the sky even!

But careful reading of Luke's account actually shows us a very different reality. The angels appeared to shepherds in the darkness of the fields. Their appearance was not at all comforting. In fact they were a terrifying spectacle.The angels had to reassure the shepherds. They had a simple message. Luke documented that the angels spoke the message rather than sang. There was no musical performance in the sky. Yes, the angels were praising God, but praises can be uttered and not sang.

It was a terrifying spectacle. And an earthshaking message. There was to be a major paradigm shift in the affairs of men. Their Messiah had been born.

It is like that for other aspects of life, isn't it? Major paradigm shifts are often terrifying events. The mistake Management often makes is to ignore how unsettling and terrifying paradigm changes are to the workforce. There is often no peace on earth and goodwill to men, other than to those in political alignment. The angels did make it clear, "...and on earth, Peace to those on whom His favour rests."

Nonetheless, Gigamole would like to wish that you all have a very blessed Christmas.

We need a major rethink of our educational system.... and please do so outside of the box.

One of the areas that Singapore can be very proud of is how we have been able to make education so available to our kids, to the extent that we can say that no child will be denied a chance to go to school. In the previous generation there many capable people who had limited opportunities simply because they did not have access to education. But not anymore. Education has indeed been the great leveler for this generation. Because schooling is now accessible to every child regardless of his/her  socioeconomic background, career opportunities are limited more by abilities and skills rather than the individual's socioeconomic stratum. Likewise for gender and ethnicity.

But sadly this appears true only to a certain degree.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) should be congratulated for making examination data available to the public. One wishes though that they would put up more detailed data, and not only cherry picked information for public consumption.

The recent data is quite instructive. They are really quite similar to previous years' data and therefore really doesn't say anything new. True, there are some wiggly movements in percentages, but they are relatively small changes. Over a long period one can see that the performance data is relatively stable. Boringly stable. This stability is actually both comforting and alarming. Comforting because it means the MOE has done an excellent job in providing education. Not much more to do. Alarming because despite all this effort, fixed disparities in educational performances between ethnic groups are apparent.

If we look at the performance at the Primary School Leaving Examinations,we see more than 90% of students pass the exams. But only the Chinese outperform the national average. The Malay students, as a group, under-perform everyone else.

This ethnic ranking not only persist at the O-levels, but the differences are markedly accentuated. And this is for 5 O-level passes. I am quite sure if we set more stringent criteria, even greater differences can be demonstrated.

This is alarming because the data is not improving despite what the amount of resources the MOE has put into the school system. I am sure the MOE is aware of this problem. But I hope they are not ignoring it. Something drastic needs to be done because the current models are not working.

To an outsider, looking at the data, such 'fixed' differences suggest a number of possibilities:
a] Our delivery of education has ethnic biases;
b] Our way of assessing has ethnic biases;
c] Ethnic biases exist in both instruction and assessment; or
d] There are real ethnic related limitations in abilities.

Since I do not subscribe to there being biologically and ethnically related limitations in ability, it must be that the first three are valid.

The MOE must spare no effort to get to the bottom of this problem. It must not rest on the laurels of its past accomplishments. There are unintended ethnic biases in how education is delivered to the public as well as ethnic biases in how the examinations are set. It is not adequate to congratulate ourselves on the performance at a national level, because this is invariably defined by the performance of the largest and most successful ethnic group. This is unfair to the minority groups who may have unaddressed special needs and considerations.

We need to remodel our educational paradigm to level the playing field for all ethnic groups.